The Vancouver Canucks are cleaning house with Jim Rutherford coming in to take over the front office. Executive director of hockey operations Jonathan Wall and assistant general manager Chris Gear have been dismissed, according to Thomas Drance of The Athletic. As Iain MacIntyre of Sportsnet notes, Rutherford hasn’t even arrived in Vancouver to meet the staff yet, but two more employees who have been with the team for more than a decade (two decades in the case of Wall) are on their way out. Farhan Lalji of TSN tweets that he understands these moves were in the works before Rutherford was officially hired.
Gear was with the club since 2010 but only assumed the AGM role in early 2020. He previously worked as legal counsel but was slowly given more responsibilities on the business side and then transferred to hockey operations in 2016. His focus was usually on contract negotiations and the salary cap, certainly not where things have gone smoothly for the Canucks in recent years. Still, Gear is considered a valuable front office employee and will likely find work somewhere else if he wishes to stay in the NHL.
Interestingly enough, the Canucks actually included Gear in the Jim Benning dismissal announcement as one of the members of hockey ops who would run things in the interim. Apparently, that isn’t the case any longer.
Wall meanwhile ran the analytics department for the Canucks and had been with the team for more than 20 years. It’s not clear yet if the team intends on replacing these positions directly or executing a complete overhaul of the structure of the front office. For now, it’s just Rutherford’s office to build from the ground up.
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